Quotes to inspire and reflect

Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, /The life that wears, the spirit that creates / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A sepulchre for its eternity.

Minds that have nothing to confer / Find little to perceive.

Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrownecked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standard that implies).

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

I like peasants—they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously.

They fall for the latest isms gullibly as pups for rubber bones.

The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy, of its malice.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.

Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.

Muzak pervades Las Vegas from the time you walk into the airport upon landing to the last time you leave the casinos.

I mean jazz. 1 don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.

The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; perhaps it kills them.

[Of music]. Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.

To produce music is also in a sense to produce children.

Music quickens time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time.

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’White Album?

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

Music was invented to.confirm human loneliness.

[Music] takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.

Where there’s music there can be no evil.

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes.

Oh! there is an organ playing in the street—a waltz too! I must leave off to listen.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite.

Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such as are discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a most present remedy.

To know whether you are enjoying a piece of music or not you must see whether you find yourself looking at the advertisements of Pear’s soap at the end of the program.

The most excising rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life.

A mind too proud to unbend oyer the small ridicu- losa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.

’Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.

There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.

All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.